The Curse of Daylight
by AsianScaper
Summary: Exploring post-movie events. MichaelSelene. This is a token for the fans. 3rd Chapter up! Plans to flee, plans to go looking for some lycan friends: plans to solve a very, very big problem...security.
1. The Curse of Daylight

**Title:** _The Curse of Daylight_   
**Author:** AsianScaper   
**Disclaimer:** I am borrowing only.   
**Rating:** PG   
**Category:** Drama/Angst   
**Spoilers:** None   
**Feedback:** Friends, enemies: review. Advice is highly sought after.   
**Summary:** Selene POV. Her guilt and herself have a little conversation.   
**Archiving:** N/A   
**Dedication:** To the fans, to the fans.   
**A Very Long Author's Note:** This is my first fic in the Underworld category and flames are fine with me, for as long as they remain constructive. I fused the first two chapters, thinking that they were much too short to stand alone; they also bite into the same banana: immortality and pain. This remains, for now, an inquiry on both. I may continue this at some later date or when the right mood settles but really, I just need to know what you think and if possible, of the improvements I must render. The story also mentions 'events of the day before'. I should think it refers to the last scenes in the movie involving Viktor's death and those after it. In truth, I'm just using this story as a vent so forgive me if it becomes too long and dreary. An experiment, to say the least.   
"Ah, Domine! Si vis, potes me mundare!" means "My lord! If you will it, you can make me clean!" or something along those lines. I just _had_ to wax Latin. After all, Selene must have grown up in an age where Latin was still taught and spoken.   
**Review watch:**   
_Lady K-_ Thank you for the kind words. The writing style still makes me cringe but thank you!   
_Padme1-_ It is confusing? Would you care to elaborate? I'd be truly grateful if you do! We're on the same boat, honey: I don't know where this story is going, either. Or if it will ever end. =D 

---- 

The night howled for remedy, as if it waited for the moon's round pill to heal it. Everything brooded; the wooden boards were dark and rotting, sighing with every footstep, protesting like old men robbed of their voices, groaning. 

The concrete walls of the underworld crept up in shadow, hiding the sky and the city with tree-like grayness, bending inward with the menace of lechers. They arched into darkness, off and away to sleep, or to that permanent manifestation of it that was death. There were times that the moon smote the murky water, attracted the senses and instantly repelled the attentions of those walking dead. 

Light had no place here but those living in its opposite found reason to weep for it, to crawl to it, to be hewn to ashes for it, as love was. 

Indeed, the pulse of reality did not reside in this place, sprouted from dreams and nightmares that neither killed nor woke. 

Oh, but Selene felt sleep more intensely in her veins; she desired to rouse from slumber. It coursed like a stream through the gorges of her body. One that sought the sea, when sun goes loving the twilight and night wages war with the day. 

Soon, soon the day would bleed and she, like the horizon, would drink of blood that melted at sunset and on, until stars smothered her appetite and halted her rampage. 

_Hunger pulls and thrashes and makes me weep. Oh me! Who never wakes at the sun's calling!_

The blue of her eyes deepened, stealing the hue of heaven and emptying it for hell. Her lips felt the protrusion of teeth and the taste that lingered, because it was always memory – brought back by mere hunger and delight. 

"I am thirsty," she heard herself whisper through her teeth, through that foretaste of blood. She was hungry, she knew. That empty flavor was there, willing to be added on, sharpened by the feel of fangs on her own lips. 

Yet again, the necklace she forever held marked the inside of her palm with the quivering grip of upended wrath. 

_I am thirsty!_

Then she woke to screams and weeping and the gnashing of teeth. 

---- 

Light that tasted natural to the firmament was her doom. 

The one that rises and sets; the other, which moves with the tide and urges with flesh and teeth. The moon, however damned it was these days, had more use for a pill than she. If it found her, its bloodlust would readily eclipse her will to survive. She believed that, and swallowed the rock at her throat. 

There was no remedy. She was hunted and in that thought, her senses were wakened. Time slipped too easily, she knew, and she smelled the air for it. 

_Ten o'clock, ante meridian._

Ten o'clock; five hours after sunrise. 

The sun would be more welcome. If it should pierce her skin, it would do so 'til she was less than what she first started with: ash. Perhaps then, they could sift her remains and build her anew. 

_Ah, Domine! Si vis potes me mundare! _

Silence. _Domine? _

She woke to a feeling that she had not possessed in all her numberless years: not after pale nights awash in red, not after she had tossed the color over them. All holiness had fled from her but that, only to give her this heaviness, as if the bulwark she had settled in was not at all around her but within her. Gritting her teeth and at once, wounding her lips, she stifled a cry. Oh, not a sound! Silence was guilt's sentry! 

Wiping the blood that nonetheless trickled on her chin, Selene stared up at the dark. And stared with as much complacence as when she witnessed the passage of souls to and from the flesh with which they dwelled in the world. Sometimes she herself arranged such passage; often, she was in the fray. Now, she wondered if she truly was old, a withered Charon on his boat. 

Unlike Charon, her sight was her refuge, for she had no lack in it, no matter how bereft of radiance the world was. Dark and its opposite melded and formed; she knew their hues but saw things just as well in each. At times, too, it was a curse; for though she sought comfort when she closed her eyes, in opening them, none could assuage her pain. 

Light and dark were the same. Always. Though real light would have killed her. 

The sound of distant civilization visited then and not gently. It jolted her to wakefulness: the gratings of metal against metal, of trains carrying one burden and exchanging it for another. She sat up languidly, feeling every movement as though it was her first and pain, that reminded her of their acquaintance. Fast friends through years that spanned Resistance, Rebellion, Revolution, Republics, and even Rebirth. 

Knowing now that sleep, or that phantom of it to one as sleepless as she, could not hear her, she sat heavily on the small cot, listening to the whir of exhaust fans and wondering at smells that none but nature could remove. 

She felt the cracks in stone as she placed a booted foot on the floor. The water there murmured a steady chorus of _drip, drip, drip,_ whispering of wells that had been dug to this place. 

Her hands were heavy, heavier than when she carried things twice her weight or threw those corpses to their tombs. The flight in her legs seemed cut of their wings; the burden of emptiness occupied the straying movement of her arms. She wanted to weep and yet could not. 

Why was it that emotion held so much sway? Why was it that in a week's time, century-old numbness had blossomed to full, awakened sensation? Feelings now were strong enough to break memory's monotonous web. Pain and anger, which she thought was the staple and had tasted stale for centuries, suddenly stung all the way to her throat like distilled beverages. 

Pausing for posterity's sake, she pulled at a switch and a lamp flickered reluctantly to life. To the human eye, everything was revealed. To her immortal ones, whatever lay before her was as it always had been. 

A computer monitor facing away from the bed threw light at the opposite wall. It stood humming with four eyes, digitally rendering information from cameras outside. She envied its haste even when it stood listless, immobile, machine-like and calculating. 

They –and sensors she hoped would never be tripped –surveyed four levels of sewerage and canals. Microfilm was strewn over the standing CPU; examinations of various compounds and castles, a legacy to her thoroughness and efficiency when surveying the domain. They had been thrown there in frustration and the fruit of it was a disorderly function of images, mixed and mismatched, blatant disclosures of what she had lost. She was Viktor's daughter no longer. No more gates to go forth from; no more repetitive yet respectful ogling at her, the Dealer of Death; no more jaunty sprawls of blood-laden banquets to be displayed in. 

Music, which would have agitated her, thankfully rang silent from the pair of multimedia speakers. She felt like sinking a pair of fangs into anything that was joyful. 

There were folders on a shelf above a metal desk, ammunition that glinted like silver snakes crawling across and carefully stacked wads of money held down by a hefty piece of weaponry. The gun had the weary look of being used too often. Another shotgun rested idly against the side of the desk, its muzzle pointed at a map, which the room's occupant had hastily stuck with duck tape. Papers had strayed to the floor, where mud brought in from the night before had hardened and joined the earth lying there. A camera stared, haunted, from an open drawer while a chair sat in the light as shyly as though it was borrowing its color. 

To her left was an entrance barely twice her width, a guide to a modest niche with nothing but a refrigerator silently whining about its bundle of cloned blood. 

The four walls –barely three strides in width and eight in length –were dressed in bare concrete. Blocks of cement posed as glum roofs, ready to squelch even the most enthusiastic of eyes. This safe house known only to herself, had been patched up like an unworthy house of sticks over the weeks following Viktor's death. What precious little time was given, was spent on buying sanctuary. Through the pandemonium that had followed it, she scoured the market, both black and not, without being carefully watched, seizing every asset and floundering in a mass of money. 

In effect, this small retreat was perpetually cool, properly dank and smelling comfortably like a sepulcher. It also stank of functionality. Her cold-blooded purpose could do nothing but applaud it. 

Dust had little time to gather and would not intentionally, unexposed as this little alcove was from the fumes of the world above. But dust did come. Clothes harbored them, boots brought them. Selene and the war fetched a great deal, in fact. 

Electricity hummed and she winced at the sound. To her heightened senses, it sounded too much like the sporadic whir of when she walked with Death. 

"Get the bloody hell up before you turn to stone," she muttered to herself, her hands curling to pale fists. 

Her boots screeched as she stood, shouting their protest. She stumbled doggedly to where liquid could sate her hunger and the refrigerator offered no resistance. She opened the fridge with a little too much force and the waft of cool air halted her progress. Visions flashed across her mind. 

_The mountains are but a hand's breadth away,_ said the mutinous thought. 

She took a bag of Ziodex blood and stared at it. It swirled like wine aged, perhaps, for thirty years? Seven? Two? A man's age? A child's? A babe's? 

"I am ill all over again," she whispered and marveled that she had not uttered those words, or the like of it, in over five hundred years. 


	2. I, Immortal

**Title:** _I, Immortal_   
**Author:** AsianScaper   
**Disclaimer:** I am borrowing only.   
**Rating:** PG   
**Category:** Drama/Angst   
**Spoilers:** None   
**Feedback:** Friends, enemies: review. Advice is a commodity highly sought after.   
**Summary:** Michael POV. Michael does his rounds, visits old haunts, and invades new ones.   
**Archiving:** N/A   
**Dedication:** N/A   
**Author's Note:** I wanted to know what Michael would feel like after gaining eternity from a single...bite. Well, inquiry again. This is all just a big experiment. Humor me. "Rendezvous" was written in a more contemporary style. I thought that a long Underworld story would need the reprieve. Flowery English just wouldn't do the job. I absolutely _need_ feedback on my characterization of Michael. Here are a few questions: Does it work? In what ways does it not? Well, do feel free to flame constructively. Again, I merged chapters as I figured it would be too short. 

----

He had heard her scream as her bellow hitched on a wind and brought it to his lycan ears. Neither song nor pealing voice halted his race over rooftop and chimney though at the prompting of hers, he rested his arms and legs onto a gargoyle and sneered at the very face of the city. The empty building throbbed for him to leave. 

_She dreams again. And wakes during the day._

His head raised, his hair falling back against his neck, he glanced at a sun too tired to wipe the clouds from its face. Rain poured perpetually; it had not stopped since the events of days before and only the concrete of buildings, of sewers, of dark alleyways, brought comfort from its ice. Blinking as if to force some realism to his sight, he found no real light, only artificial dawns that men brought with them. 

Such cold, however, did not seem far from the temperature of his own. His strange skin was reveled at by living and the unanimated alike. Rain that should have been cold to him was lukewarm. Rats stiffened; crows dared not deliver their message of death. Concrete that should have heralded him, did not speak. His treading became a silent parade that none thought to look at. Always, he caught mortals unaware and wondering if he had been a dream or a trick of the eyes, or a shadow of their own corpses. 

He was too new in this world and at the same time, too old a product of it. 

The gargoyle, its eyes peering through a swirl of marble, had no real words to impart, except an expression fixated on robbing any onlooker of his smile. His had long since withered to voiceless contemplation since the day began. He smiled. _What day?_ While one looked to the heavens, the sky had ceased to exist. Boiling tendrils of smoldering rain hovered instead. 

Michael, for his part, shared the gargoyle's gaze, his eyes so late into the night that its color shunned all daylight. The blue of his skin melted into the city's shade until even the gray of buildings hid his form. 

He had realized that those walking dots below him, some in umbrellas, some bare-headed and hunched into their coats, could not possibly know the itch. The itch of harrowing death, the itch for conclusions, the longing for an end to relentless years of existence. Though this was only the beginning, the word 'immortal' had a new, frightening ring to it. A ring, which was tolled only when the shoe finally fit. He was damned because his blue feet fit all too well. 

This city he had adopted on a mission of peace and servitude, had swallowed him into myth, into its legend, its irrational violence that hid below veins of underground tunnels and in citadels of stone. He howled for reprieve and closed his eyes at the futility of it. 

_You've lingered too long, animal._

The thirty floors below him was too eager a wish, he knew. 

He leapt anyway. And lived. 

---- 

Rendezvous

He fell through a city avenue and landed quietly behind a hooded man in sneakers. The fellow quickly turned and Michael, on all fours, crouched to be hidden from view. The day had darkened to the point of almost twilight obscurity and the singular light from the lamp post did nothing to chase the gloom. Droplets that ran off the man's umbrella spattered on Michael's exposed back; cool rain that did nothing to move him. Still and barely breathing, Michael waited. 

"The West End just keeps getting better," the human muttered sardonically, clearly shaken. 

The man shrugged his nervousness off, looked at his timepiece and finally, boarded a bus heading downtown. As the person disappeared behind doors hissing closed, Michael emerged gradually from shadow. The rest of the street remained empty of people and a glance at another avenue beyond the one he stood in, offered some reprieve from seclusion. 

Newspapers had begun to disintegrate into the gutters and the dirt of the road gathered at the drainage. The lit post beside the bus stop had put a spotlight on the fact. 

Michael, his naked torso glistening and his pants still intact, quickly surveyed the street. He found no smell, no profound insight into the wet gloom of it, only the shifting aroma of a man who had stumbled and brushed against a heavily perfumed woman here; another who had eaten a bagel there, a third who had spilled coffee onto his own lap. 

_What a mess._

The jacket Michael had thrown aside while cruising the rooftops lay untouched behind a newspaper stand. He donned it, zipping up the front and cowering inside like a novice in a convent. 

He walked through the narrow streets and found definition there; some bit of meaning to the strange rhythm that was his life. These trips were always painful: that in walking, he instead slithered and crawled in this new body. That he sniffed and tasted the air as if his tongue were for touching and the wind textured with explanations. 

He suffered more from exhaustion eventually. The zest of the next boulevard served to deplete his caution. 

He came by a familiar intersection and leaned on a pole as the traffic rushed by, throwing water against all that passed. The light told him to come hither to the other street as traffic slowed for pedestrians. He crossed with two other men in trench-coats and a rush of hidden crisp shirts bumping against his wet jacket, steadying an old lady with her cane as he helped her walk the short distance between sidewalks. 

"Thank you," the old lady muttered, gathering a plethora of artificial teeth. "You young men are always helpful." 

"Always?" Michael asked softly. 

The lady looked at him with peculiar disgust. "Well, you're cynical for one so young." But before he could reply, she lumbered steadily enough on her own. "And get yourself some shoes!" she hollered in afterthought. 

He looked at his feet and managed a smile. _And the old still retain some bit of wisdom. Definitely a good sign._

Rounding a corner, he found no real summons from the smell of food that finally came to his nostrils. Only a hardening in his gut. 

The old haunts. The steady, old haunts that he could no longer visit. The diner with its elongated body, dropped on a lot with no grass, sitting there as if it was the only place it could have been built on. Rain soaked it; a metal rod washed and waxed. It was painted on colors of blue and red. Inside, he could see a variety of people. Businessmen on short breaks, waitresses waiting on lusty young men, salesmen in glaring new coats, construction men on coffee break, a whole squad of traffic enforcers munching on donuts. And doctors in faces heavy with bags for their eyes. 

Doctors. Interns. Nurses. Laughing, complaining, sleeping beside their coffee and their breakfast. Making notes, brandishing stethoscopes around busy necks. Listless with twelve hours of continuous consciousness. 

Old, old haunts. He sniffed, as if to gather the aroma to himself. To live it, at least. Though the time left to him was cut short. It was always so short, no matter what his body whispered to him of eternity. 

His view turned sharply and his torso whipped from over his feet. 

"Hey! Watch where you're going!" someone in front of him yelled. 

"Yeah, sorry." 

"Homeless old git," came the muttered reply. 

_Gotta get going. Move, move, move, Michael. No need to attract too much attention. And you haven't got any shoes on._

Past the old diner and into a shop, he quickly slipped through a back door and found himself alone in an alley, waiting for the silence to trip. He expectedly did the tripping, inciting the echo of a manhole cover to bite the ground as he silently slipped inside. A new surplus of smells threatened to strain his already sensitive nose. In an attempt to distract himself, he concentrated on his hearing. 

A car had rushed by through a side street just above, the sound of its engines swallowed by the concrete around. Then came the august drip of water and an even more merry December to the weather of the place. He rubbed his arms. 

"Don't dally, Michael," he told himself and made his way, however reluctantly, through the grime of the underworld. 

Mills had not expected the animal so early in the day. But it should have been expected, with the way the rains had toppled routines and built new ones. The darkness outside had somehow contradicted the motions of nature, deepening when the light should have brightened. The sun ought to rise from the gloom of rain clouds some time this afternoon, no matter how much it hid this morning. Well, at least that was what the television had said and what his own vile experience had imparted in the last one hundred years under the tempests of the city. 

"You come unannounced. Again." The creature opened its mouth to say something but Mills raised a hand to stop him. "I'm not one to latch onto the business of those above. So please, keep your mouth shut." 

Those simpering fools! Those meddlesome critics of the exiled! And this _thing_ was included in that horrible disarray! 

"I know," the animal said. "Just deliver the blood I need." 

He owned a quiet sort of voice; as quiet as a black mamba slinking on its way to the grocer. 

Mills had the nerve to poke it. He sneered. "You _need_? For all I know, you've taken a vampiress for your wife!" He spat the sentence, a black knot of mystery and half-truths that landed on the floor. Though he admitted that his spittle did not deserve to deal such a blow. 

The creature barely winced. "Careful with your words," it said. 

"It's none of my business," Mills cut in complacently. He did nothing to test the mood. "But I've heard my share of rumors and truth." 

And the creature knew he could not come back. Not ever. "No real need to listen to that rubbish, now is there?" 

Mills blinked, his eyes suddenly blue, grabbing the color of the sky from where all demons had fallen. "No, not at all, unless I wished it." He pointed at a space behind him. "The blood's in the cooler. Get them and get out. Please." 

That bit of courtesy hurried the creature's actions. It carried the cooler without so much as a grunt, heaving it against its oddly colored skin. The flesh had peeked from under its jacket. 

Mills' eyes glinted, the display of syringes beside him suddenly screaming to be touched. 

"I know what you're thinking," it said. "You don't want to know what I am. It would only tempt you to kill me to try." 

"Don't judge me so easily," Mills scoffed. 

"I'm not. But I can judge a scientist from one who isn't. Don't step any closer." The creature's eyes turned a worse shade of black and whatever fanciful imaginings Mills had concocted for his hypotheses, suddenly became very, very real. 

"Abomination," was the dictate of reason. 

"Yeah, if that's what you want to call it." The creature almost seemed abject in its response. 

Mills immediately found abandoned norms surfacing to take the front seat. "You're not suppose to exist," he said matter-of-factly, his voice lilting to higher degrees. 

"Simply put, yes." The creature turned to face him squarely and Mills, for all his inquiry, only felt the familiar surge of anger and abhorrence towards something that had always been thought to be a threat to his species. 

Just as his own species were constantly a threat to himself. And that consideration brought the blue in his eye back to the green that was truly his from the beginning. 

"Well, what did I say?" Mills growled, urging both of them to be fully aware of the other. "Get your stuff and get out!" 

The creature stood dumb for a moment, wondering at what had passed between himself and the other man. Then, unexpectedly, as was its wont, it said, "Thanks", leaving the door behind him open as his shadow ceased to linger at its frame. 


	3. Flight

**Title:** _Flight_   
**Author:** AsianScaper   
**Disclaimer:** I am borrowing only.   
**Rating:** PG   
**Category:** Drama/Angst   
**Spoilers:** None   
**Feedback:** Friends, enemies: review. Advice is a commodity highly sought after.   
**Summary:** Plans to flee, plans to go looking for some lycan friends: plans to solve a very, very big problem...security.   
**Archiving:** N/A   
**Dedication:** To my mother, who is such a prick, and to the young ones, who really ought to know that mothers know best...most of the time.   
**Author's Note:** Well, I do realize that this isn't your usual ff.net reader's cup of tea, as it is very serious reading. I did some explaining on the background of events. Apparently, Selene knew all along that they'd be needing the lycans' help, thus her choice to stay put in the city. I have this nagging feeling that I'm going to come across a HUGE loop-hole in all this. Nonetheless, the story primarily serves as a character study and not really an attempt on plot. We'll save that aspect of the short story for the next few chapters.   
**Review Watch:**   
_Lady K:_ Thanks you for the reviews once more. I hope the story below would do some more explaining and lift some of the mysteriousness from the first two chapters.   
_Padme1:_ Well, let's all keep our fingers crossed and hope this is worth the read! The revamping of the writing style was entirely because of you though of course, it isn't _too_ changed. Many thanks for the honest reviews!

----

She could smell the portent in him, like freshly thatched roofs on a spring day.

She raised an eyebrow. Spring day? Had she finally lost her mind? Those thoughts had abandoned her long before eternity settled like a second skin; when she saw the twins in a hapless mode of collapse, bleeding at the neck, with eyes turned upward, as though they had drowned. She had forgotten spring and all the cycles of the world, had shunned daylight even as that necessity had been bestowed upon her by Viktor.

Viktor. Her lord. Her erstwhile master. Her great love amidst the centuries! Long centuries with longer decades which spanned the new thoughts of the Renaissance, the genius of Bonaparte, the impertinent rites of the Holocaust and even then, were so little compared to him. So little!

Her thoughts were interrupted by a violent rapping at the door and she opened it, only to stumble backwards.

Michael burst through, dropping his load and frowning with the same bland expression she adopted when she had first been turned. It frightened her, that look; it marred any sensibilities. She always imagined him to be pure, untouchable. Now, he had lost some of his softness, his restlessness more apparent, more familiar with frequent slips in his human demeanor. He was older, she knew; older with the knowledge of his own immortality and suddenly, too impatient to remember that he counted as one of the undead.

"You're awake again," he admonished, his concerned tone imparting that he had caught her awake during daylight more often than not.

She fancied that the human had used the same tone on his patients.

"I have been awake for five centuries, Michael," was her cold reply.

"Fair enough." He raised his head, his hair perpetually moist, pasted to his face as though adoring the lines there, however young and naive.

He had always been gentle, in manner and in voice. It was as though he had forgotten how it was to rage against the darkness; when at the urging of his affection for her, he had lost both temper and demeanor. He paced through this newly found gloom as though he was made of it and shunned it as though it would –in the end –kill him.

Days in her coven had been more than different to his company. Everyone had a tendency to remember the hushed calm of apathy, whether things were going awry or not.

Michael, after confirming his suspicions about her insomnia, stepped around her and ignored her stare as he piled the blood packs into the refrigerator. Quietly, he told her, "Mills isn't to be trusted any more. He's heard news from over ground. " He paused as he wiped some grime from one of the packs. "All hell's going to break loose, Selene. I have this _feeling_, you know, like a…like a storm coming."

"A storm coming?" she repeated, tasting the words to see if they were strange.  Oddly enough, they were not.

_Portents. I feel it too._

She continued, "Then it is decided."

"Since I was never part of your plans to begin with," he said, grinning so easily. "May I ask what you're talking about?"

"We search for your lycan friends." She sat on the only desk they shared, sifting through the photographs there and picking out one for him to look at.

Wiping his hands on his already sodden jeans, he took the picture and inspected the image there.

"Look familiar?" Selene asked.

"Lucian?"

"Go deeper, Michael."

His eyes turned inward and they glazed over, lost in another plane. There was a hint of a smile on his lips, then later, a frown deeper than the travails of a lifetime. Finally, he closed his eyes and rubbed his temple, cringing. A tear unexpectedly rolled down his cheek and he hastily wiped it with his arm, sniffing silently.

"Oh, _that_. What about my memories?"

"We could use those," she said, taking the photograph from him and studying the anxious set to his shoulders. "And get out of those filthy clothes. We'll walk the streets tonight but for now, you must rest."

"I don't feel like resting."

"You never do, Michael and I don't expect you ever will," Selene said sardonically, standing and then leaning on the door frame, her hands on her hips. "Rest. Your body ought to remember sleep."

He chuckled then, touching the shotgun with his fingers as he edged closer to her and leaned on the desk. He asked her gently, "And you? Where are you going?"

"Hunting."

Staring at her, his expression softened and the soothing calm of his voice told her softly, "I'll come with you."

"No need. Just rest; get your strength back."

She stepped out the door, closed it, and paused at the entrance.

She heard him change, a bit of shuffling as he looked for the pillow she had inadvertently threw under the cot, a curse as he stumbled out of his pants, the locker at the foot of the bed banging as he shut it closed. A sigh as he the bed squeaked under his weight, when he lay down and gathered what blankets there were to himself.

"Selene, you slob," she heard him mutter as he realized that he was lying on some newspapers and other articles of clothing.

He coughed for a moment, and must have looked at the ceiling in contemplation of the day and in trembling dread of the night. Then he would have closed his eyes, remembering daylight, warmth and joy and dreaming of all the opposites.

She started to walk away. He had snored not long after and he reminded her -oh, so very often! -that he was like a child.

----

He woke up to familiar noises, to the weak drumbeat of leaking pipes, to the sorting of papers, to cold breaths and frustrated scribbling on paper. There was the _tickety-tick, tick_ of the keyboards, the movements hurried at one time, at another executed slowly.

Then he could hear her clearing her throat and through mere habit, he knew she was leaning against an elbow, scanning the information on her desk, gathering data through the computer. In all, she would have looked uncaringly serene. However, if he was to say anything, she would have snapped at his comment, revealing more than just fatigue and frustration.

Her fingers drummed at the desk, darting after photographs, caressing weaponry, dealing quick touches to the keys.

Michael knew that as her head gradually leaned sideways, her hair would fall to her line of view and the movement would wake her. Too concentrated on her task, she would only continue without brushing it away from her face.

He would have expected a yawn but found none, not even the soft _thrum, thrum_ of a heart or the overbearing heat of something _alive_. Shuddering, he turned to the wall and stared at it, the colors changing from grey to black as Selene shifted from one screen to the next against the computer's light, a silhouette of vast alterations in flesh and modes of being.

"We move in an hour and a half," he heard Selene say.  "I should think that the impression you had on the rooftops is finally coming to realization."

"Did you call the movers?" he said, half-smiling and congratulating that part of him which desperately clung to humor. He sounded condescending but with the way he had been treated by fate so far, the greater joke was being played, ultimately, on him.

She did not miss a beat, "If you have anything precious in the hard drive, you'd better inform me now; I'm purging the computer. We won't be visiting here again for quite some time. Photographs are with me, camera included. I suggest you take the shotgun, despite the fact you won't be needing it."

"We're visiting the arms dealers?"

"Yes, before anything else."

"Food? Supplies?"

"Let me worry about those."

"Can I do anything?" He had not bothered to sit up from the bed.

"Other than sleep? No. Not for now." She pointed at the pile of bags stacked against the door and he noticed that the place had been stripped bare but for the map and the shotgun by the table. "You'll do much of the carrying however," she added.

The cooler was stacked to the brim, gagging with its contents of blood. With the memory of how hefty the thing was earlier, he sighed.

She turned away from him and he could hear the smile in her voice. "Don't be so glum, Michael."

"I should be. I don't even know where we're going," he said.

"The outskirts. We've dallied too long. In two weeks' time, Death Dealers will have scoured this place and put our heads on a pole." She typed a command into the keyboard, turning the monitor to face him. "See this? I had a little look-see into a friend's inbox. Dead, to say the least." Her face seemed to sag as sadness seeped through her cheeks. Just as readily, it assembled the beaten mask of coldness and her face was whole once more.

She said, "You would never have believed that they've sent a vast amount of information all over the continent, both through electronic mail and word of mouth, as well as runners in every direction. The covens are looking for us, delving ever deeper into places never touched by the sun. Mills, despite his self-imposed exile, would have found out sooner or later and spilled his beans; luckily, he spilled it on you."

"When was it sent?" Michael asked, getting up and lumbering towards her, his limbs remembering sleep, just as Selene had advised they do. Slow and gradually enjoying his slowness, he read the entry at a leisurely pace -if not to delight in his proximity to her -and made his way back to the bed.

"Just over a week ago, enough time to mobilize a large enough force around this city and the ones surrounding it."

"Sent by whom? Last I knew, Ordoghaz was a den of pandemonium."

Selene paused a moment, as though remembering something. "Marcus, apparently," she said. "Do not expect him to strike quickly; none of the Elders are alive, slaughtered to nondescript hollows of memory. I doubt anyone intelligent enough would have volunteered to wake him or any of the remaining two." She almost choked on her last words. "Nonetheless, the bastard's trying to bait us."

"Into doing what?"

Selene glared at him, her impatience lending her some annoyance. Somehow, the leather and latex she wore made her seem more sinister, like a pillar in a crypt, hiding a malicious figure or merely sitting there, a sentinel to death. A fang peeped through her lips, stark against their redness. "You ask too many questions. He's baiting us into leaving, into flight. Anyone with the proper eyes would know what you are. Mills, too blind by hatred for his own kind, only discovered the truth too late."

"Why? Why would leaving be so dangerous?" Michael asked.

"Think, Michael. With covens spanning the continents, sight and surveillance would be easier if your target was out in the open and _moving_ across your territory. They have agents everywhere, scouts at every corner: they can acquire airline schedules, the names and backgrounds of any who would go overseas. The docks are being watched and every ship would have a sleeper in it."

"Why didn't we leave earlier? When all hell had broken loose?"

"Because Michael, your lycans live here, the bulk of them anyway. Nowhere else. We cannot leave the city without some measure of safety -at least, not without enlisting their help." Her own words served to disable her; the implications hidden there had the ring of novelty and more, of the most terrible betrayal to her kind.

Her expression dared him to ask more questions. Michael knew, that behind the tight set of her lips and the rigidness of her jaws, there was doubt.

The same doubt he had wanted no part of during his last days with humanity.

Michael, affording himself the intelligence of an intern and the courage of a victim, exclaimed, "What are we going to do when we find them? Lead? Is that what you want us to do?"

The words rang like a bell in a cistern, hollow and shrill.

Selene frowned, her face imitating the rigor of the Greek goddess of the hunt, and also, matching it in immortal beauty and severity.

"We? You _are_ Lucian. And I a memory, a shadow of the woman who wore all the auguries of doom." She lifted a pendant from her pocket, a sight he rarely relished.

The token had once been found around the lycan leader's neck. Now, it shimmered in her hand, polished by the numerous times her hands had stroked it, in memory and in pain. In many ways, it belonged to her more readily than it did to Michael.

His memories of it only served to give Lucian's voice more influence, and he found the lycan's memories running after him like a tide, pushing against the sands of time and unto his shores, ramming and often violently insistent. If Michael were to be given the thing, he would refuse. He did not take leashes and that particular one, was too heavy.

"Tonight, we look for refuge," she said, as she leaned on the chair and looked at the ceiling, as though the answers lay in brick and stone. Those answers had to be pried from the past, from a wall that none wanted to break.

Her hand around Lucian's pendant curled into a fist; she put it against her forehead, her eyes squeezed shut, as though some comfort could be coaxed from it, some bit of redemption. After a moment, before he could offer his own words to placate her, she placed it in her pocket with a gentleness even Michael envied.

"Go to sleep, Michael," she said, breathing deeply. "Go to sleep. There is much to be done tonight."

And in her ability to forget, she continued to systematically multi-task on the computer, ignoring the world around her through the shrewd ministrations of vigilance. With that, he remembered just how vast the difference between their ages was. In the measure of immortality, he was a child.

He drifted off to sleep again. To remember the day and to forget because he really was young, younger than the walk of long ages, which hardened a man's -or for this matter, a woman's -heart to stone.


End file.
